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Monthly Archives: July 2016

Light on plot, but full of passion and – well – fury, Soho Theatre’s modern retelling of Medea throws a cold eye over class and misogyny in today’s London

Sam is a 25-year-old single mum living in a council flat in increasingly gentrified Peckham. Her ex, Rob, hovers on the sidelines of her life, benevolent but busy with his new, pregnant, wife.

Sam’s meets her neighbour, Tom, a student swept in on the wave of gentrification one fateful day when she bangs on his door to ask him to turn his music down. There are barely two years between the two of them, but there’s a lifetime of experience. Sam scrapes by on benefits and a cleaning job she struggles to hold down, Tom is studying for an MA he can barely remember.

The friction that their two dramatically different lives creates sparks a spiral of events that leads to Sam’s sense of reality fracturing and an increasingly unstable grip on her family and mind.

Fury is a modern re-telling of Medea, and, like Medea, Sam is not cut from the likeable female mould, nor is she one of the saintly poor that writers through the generations have portrayed. She is hugely flawed: she sleeps with her friends’ boyfriends, hits her children, backchats to employees. But she is in a very modern trap, just about surviving in a city bloated with wealth, she is forced into a life where she has neither money nor choice, where society demands her to be perfect in exchange for what little help and sympathy they allow themselves to give to a single mother who doesn’t seem grateful for the miserable lot life has given her.

Fury is more than a Greek re-boot; Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s script examines class in modern Britain where the poor, stuck on welfare, rub shoulders with the All Sainted-ed shoulders of the middle classes that are increasingly encroaching on London’s traditional working class areas – and homes.

The staging is punchy and Hannah Hauer-King’s director fluid, the chorus circling the stage telling Sam’s story through words and song. The cast are all superb, Sarah Ridgeway as Sam carries her character’s weights with such intensity she looks done in at the curtain call. Alex Austin as Tom straddles the line between creepy and caring so well you never really know what you think of him even when his part in Sam’s downfall is laid out so starkly.

Fury does rather creak under the weight of its own issues that somewhat derails the narrative. Eclair-Powell’s message heavy writing is powerful, but the light plot didn’t quite capture Sam’s life with quite as much authority as the weighty subject matter demanded. But Fury remains a punchy, fiery, necessary and entertaining production with an impressive cast at its heart.